Hi there. I recently dug out an old Compaq evo n610c laptop, and decided to install puppy on it. Everything seems to work fine, except the sound. I have tried 2 distros (lucid, and racy), and the sound works on neither. I have tried messing around with the mixer, and running alsa, but had no luck.

I am hoping someone can give me some tips on things to check, or try. Without sound, the computer is worthless to me for what I intend to use it for.

But occasionally sound won't work after I've cold-booted the machine, and I have to reboot for the card to function properly. I'm not sure why this is. It seems to happen less often now that I've upgraded to the 2.4.20 kernel (I'd been using 2.2.18 before) , but it still happens occasionally. "

Are you sure that there isn't a hardwareproblem with the soundcard or internal speakers?
I have an evo n600c withs Slacko 5.3.3 and have sound.
One thing is that i sometimes don't get sound at cold boot, then I open Retrovol, tick the PCM slider once and got back sound.

I start to suspect a problem somewhere with the audio components inside. Did you try a headphone to see if there is sound coming from the jack connector in front?
Is it possible to try another live cd distro like Ubuntu to see if it comes to life with sound ?
My experience so far is, that if a wrong driver is loaded, not even a speaker icon is shown. But iam still a learning puppy user....

I tried that, and no go. I pulled the motherboard, and the headphone jack is broken loose partially. I suspect what is happening is the headphone jack is shorted, so the computer thinks a pair of headphones is plugged in, and cuts sound to the main speakers.

Maybe there is a way to set the OS to still play sound through the main speakers when headphones are plugged in? I'm going to look in to that some while I look for a new motherboard. If anyone has any more tips for me, I'd appreciate the input.